“It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I don’t think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“The term ‘the American Left’ is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn’t really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“Of course, I do everything for money.”
– Christopher Hitchens